How To – Move From WordPress.com To WordPress.org

Moving a Blog from WordPress.com to WordPress.org is something I’ve had a lot of questions about – today Jeff Chandler shares tips on how to do it.

Everyday it seems like I find a story or two from a cities local online newspaper which delves into the topic of blogging and what it’s all about. The story usually goes through a mini backlog of history surrounding the term, what blogging is and at the end of the article, there is usually a list of suggestions on how to get started with the most popular suggestion being WordPress.com. Using WordPress.com is a great way to introduce yourself to blogging but if you decide that you want to turn blogging into a full time job or just want more control over your work, you’ll need to move.

Thankfully, the move from WordPress.com to WordPress.org (WordPress.org being the self hosted version of WordPress) is painless thanks in large part to a great export tool.

To start things off, login to your WordPress.com account and browse to your administration panel. From the menu on the left, click on TOOLS – EXPORT. At this point, you have the option to confine the export to a particular author or all authors. Using the export tool will compile your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags. This information is placed into a WXR file or, WordPress eXtended RSS file. Essentially, this file is just a normal XML RSS based file with a couple of custom fields added to it which makes it specific to WordPress. Once you’re finished, click on the Download Export File button and save it to your desktop.

Once you have that file on your desktop, you can breath a little easier considering your half way through the content migration process.

The second part of this guide refers to an installation of WordPress 2.7. Login to your self installed WordPress administration panel and from the menu on the left click on TOOLS – IMPORT. From the list of blogging systems click on WordPress. Next, click on the Browse button and locate the XML file you downloaded earlier. This will upload the XML file into your WordPress installation and will unpack all of the data the file contains. There is one caveat though regarding this entire technique.

Most webhosts for whatever reason still have their PHP.ini configured in such a way where end users can only upload files with a maximum file size of 2MB or smaller. Although it takes quite a bit of content in an WXR file to go over 2MB, 2MB is not a lot of head room. If you find yourself in the position where your WXR file is larger than the maximum file size, I highly suggest submitting a trouble ticket to your webhost and asking them to increase the limit. If they choose not to, then ask them if they can import the file for you. If that doesn’t work, you can pull a trick from your sleeve by uploading a custom php.ini file to your webhosting accounts root folder. This is what my host did for me and afterwards, I took a look at the php.ini file and noticed it had this line in it:

; Maximum allowed size for uploaded files.
upload_max_filesize = 7M

Apparently, the php.ini file overwrote the settings on the original file and I was able to bump my limit up to 7 Megabytes. This trick is not guaranteed to work. As a last ditch effort, you can also try adding these lines to your .htaccess file. Just replace the pound sign with a number that is above the size of your WXR file.

#set max upload file size
php_value upload_max_filesize #M

#set max post size
php_value post_max_size #M

Once the WXR file is unpacked on your self installed version of WordPress, you’re ready to walk through the gates of freedom without skipping a beat!

P.S. This strategy also works for those wanting to go from WordPress.org to WordPress.com.

I just came across your blog about and wanted to drop you a note telling you how impressed I was with the information you have posted here. I also have a web site & blog about advertising/blogging so I know I’m talking about when I say your site is top-notch!

Can you please give any advice for those people who really dont have the money to buy all these pricey tools for blogging and advertising. I have a blog well rather vlog and i would like to monetize it in the best way. Any advise

Great article!!! I’m planning on writing one for http://powermywordpress.comand this will inspire me!!!
I’m taking the idea of moving to wordpress.org further as I install wordpress for people who lack the skills and I do this on free hosting!!! This is really the best solution for people who aren’t going to be drawing thousands of visitors a day (which is 98% of people anyway) and who don’t want to pay monthly hosting charges. Check it out: http://powermywordpress.com!!!

Thanks, this was incredibly easy with your help. My blog is two months old, but I see it did not carry over my theme, etc. Not a big deal though, I will likely do a little rebranding as well and tweak the theme myself if possible. Really happy to have this on my own site and generating traffic to my website instead of a separate blog!

my only question is; how will it affect my google PR? so let’s just say your .com account is getting regular hits and you would like to have it monetized but since it’s a .com account, you can’t so you would like to move it to.org, will it still carry its google PR?